March 2014

I’m about to take my comprehensive exams at NYU’s Department of Performance Studies. In an effort to pry open a little crack in the often strangely sealed academic institution, I threw a DINNER EXAM/EXAM DINNER party for friends who weren’t currently enrolled in school.

We made food and I gave little pseudo-lectures and readings on each of my exam lists.

i’ll be backing up barbara browning and imre lodbrog with my cello (along with dave flaherty on drums) on saturday, march 15th around 6:30 at hotel particulier in nyc. from the press release:

In this evening of music, video installation and reading, Barbara Browning will introduce Imre Lodbrog, an aging French rock star and minor – or possibly major – genius. Barbara Browning writes fiction, and Imre Lodbrog is fictional, but she didn’t make him up. Imre Lodbrog did it for her, and served himself up on a platter.

There are moments in Minima Moralia in which Adorno’s fragmentary thought-images condense even further into little biting nuggets and zippy one-liners. Some day I’m going to start an Adorno bumper sticker and fortune cookie line:

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass”

“To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.”

“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime”

“True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves”

“Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak with out provoking strength”

“Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary”